Our liberals refuse to admit that serf economy is still
practised on a vast scale in the Russian countryside to this
day. Serfdom lives on, for when the semi-pauper peasant, held in bondage by
means of money loans or the renting of land, works for the landlord with
his wretched horse and implements, we have here the economic essence of
serf economy.

Under capitalism the worker owns neither land nor implements of
production. Under serf economy the exploited labourer has both land and
implements of production, but these serve to enslave him, to tie
him to the “squire”.

The journal Russkaya Mysl, which is noted for its preaching of
respect for landed property, accidentally blurted out the
truth in its March issue.

“Winter hiring,”[1] we read in that issue“—is this not absurd in our age, the age of
electricity and aeroplanes? And yet this form of slavery and bondage
continues to flourish to this day, like a leech on the body of the
peasantry.

“Winter hiring is a curious and characteristic feature
of ancient Russia. It has preserved in all its freshness the feudal term of
‘bonded peasants’.”

This was written not by some “Left” organ, but by a journal of the
counter-revolutionary liberals!

According to local statistics for the spring of 1913, the “bonded”
households sometimes—as, for example, in Chernigov Gubernia—constitute
as much as 56 per cent, i. e., nearly three-fifths, of the total
number of households. And during winter hire the peasant receives half
or one-third of the pay he gets during summer hire.

Here we have purely serf bondage and hopeless poverty among the
peasants, side by side with “progress” in the development of the
otrubs, fodder grass cultivation, the employment of machines, and
so forth, over which some naive people wax so enthusiastic. As a matter of
fact, this progress, perpetuating as it does appalling poverty and bond age
among the masses of the peasants, only worsens their conditions, makes
crises more inevitable, and intensifies the contradiction between the
requirements of modern capitalism and barbarous, medieval and Asiatic
“winter hiring”.

Métayage, tilling the soil in return for half the crop, or
mowing hay in return for every third haycock (the “one third” system) are
also direct survivals of serfdom. According to the latest statistics, the
area of land cultivated by peasants on the métayer system in the
various districts of Russia ranges from 21 to 68 per cent of the area of
the peasants’ own land. And the area of land on which hay is mown on the
métayer system is even larger, ranging from 50 to 185 per cent of
the area of the peasants’ own land!...

“In some cases,” we read in this moderate-liberal
journal, “the méayer, in addition to paying for the land with half
the crop, and for the hay with two-thirds of the crop, is obliged to
work gratis on the owner’s farm for one or two weeks, in most
cases with his own horse, or with one of his children.”

How does this differ from serfdom? The peasant works for the landlord
without pay, and receives land from him on a métayage basis!

Our liberals always regard the “peasant question” from the point of
view of the peasants’ “land hunger” or the need for “state arrangement”
of the peasants’ living conditions, or of allotting them land according to
this or that “norm” (this is a fault of the Narodniks, too). This point
of view is basically erroneous. It is all a matter of the class struggle on
the basis of the feudal relations of production, and nothing more. So long
as the present system of landlordism exists, the perpetuation of bondage,
serfdom and, as Russkaya Mysl expresses it, slavery, is
inevitable. No “reforms” or political changes will be of any use
here. The point at issue here is the ownership of the land by a class which
reduces all “progress” to snail’s pace, and turns the masses of the
peasantry into downtrodden paupers tied to the “squire”.

The issue here is not that of a “subsistence” or a “producer’s”
norm (all this is Narodnik nonsense), not that of “land hunger”, or
“allotting land”, but of abolishing class, semi-feudal oppression, which
is hindering the development of a capitalist country. Only in this way can
the “proverbial” “pillars” of the class-conscious Russian workers begin
to be understood.

Notes

[1]Winter hiring—the hiring of peasants for summer work,
practised by The landlords and kulaks during the winter, when the peasants
were badly in need of money and would accept extortionate terms.